In a world where a lot of sexually coercive situations involve alcohol, it’s unconscionable to run an ad like the one Belvedere put out last Friday. In fact, horrible economy or not, we hope the people responsible were not only fired immediately, but tattooed on the forehead with the words “utterly unhirable.”
In a world where employers can easily find out everything about you, where insurance companies can decide to give or deny coverage because they see some status update as representing a liability, where a judge at family court can take away your children because — God forbid — you had a photo taken at Playboy West some Halloween… It’s not a matter of the web exposing you. It’s a matter of no longer having the ability to segregate different aspects of your life as we were once easily able to do and the concern is entirely valid.
At the same time, the hard data makes clear just how much more effective the Dutch strategy has been. Sexually active teens in the Netherlands are, as Schalet shows, much more likely to use contraception than their American counterparts. Rates of teenage pregnancy and abortion are also substantially lower.
Sunday kicked off the first day of International Anti-Street Harassment Week, a week-long effort to challenge the acceptance of gender-based street harassment, and to begin work toward possible solutions. Given the popularity of the Shit People Say video meme that has captivated the web’s imagination in recent months, the organization Stop Street Harassment has created a video to illustrate ways that men can play a role in putting an end to street harassment.
Every woman knows the word slut has power. Whether you love it or hate it, the word “slut” is an evocation of a gender double standard used to control women and no woman alive hasn’t thought about what it means to be labeled in this way. In some cultures, where honor killings take place, it is a matter of life or death. If you’re a “good” woman, don’t kid yourself. It means you’ve spent your life and will continue to spend your life calibrating your appearance, speech and behavior so that you are not a slut.
Sandra Fluke, who finally got her opportunity to share the views of Georgetown Law’s Students for Reproductive Justice, told those in attendance about the plight faced by women who need birth control not only to prevent pregnancy, but also to treat illness such as polycystic ovarian syndrome and endometriosis. On his show, Rush Limbaugh responded that the only reason students care about contraception is because they’re oversexed.
Asceticism, however, contorts desire from its essential nature into a strange and unrecognizable beast. It bends desire so far around that desire turns back onto itself and consumes its own tail. By advocating for desire only towards an unknowable abstraction, theology denies desire in its very essence, which is as an immediate and bodily drive. This is how the apologists for ascenticism argue that practicing death is in fact an attenuation of desire: they refuse to acknowledge that the essence of desire is a bodily drive.
There is something of a perception that Wellcome was a rather undiscriminating collector and that he also acquired a good deal of material of non-medical interest through buying up job lots which dealers had carefully salted with one or two medical items. In fact it turned out that he was specifically acquiring in the area of classical sexually-themed objects.
Hoping to provide pro-choice supporters a space to counter anti-abortion rhetoric and activity surrounding the “40 Days for Life” Lent campaign, a Tumblr has been erected to cheer on those who believe that a woman’s body doesn’t belong to society. “We believe that women deserve accurate and impartial information about their pregnancy options and that abortion should be legal and accessible for those women who require it,” reads the 40 Days of Choice site.
Ironically, the satisfaction of the closed desire’s object is actually more enjoyable when approached through open desires. Sex is the best case in point: if the sexual act itself is the desire, then permission to accomplish the act or perhaps the lead-in to the act become the actual climax of the desire. Everything after the point where sex is “acquired” — that is, the sexual act itself — is an unnecessary afterthought and fundamentally empty.
